Mineo Higashi (born 1938) is a Japanese writer. He was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 1971 for his novel An Okinawan Boy (Okinawa no shonen, 1971).^[1] The novel's setting is from the city of Koza (later Okinawa City) in the 1950s, where the main character grows up in a family whose business is to arrange meetings between American soldiers and Okinawian girls in the family's apartment.